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SPAM Button Trigger Finger

As churches start to really use the people scheduling and team features, more and more volunteers are getting emails that originate from WP. By the strictest definition of the word, these emails might be considered spam because they are often unsolicited. But 99.999% of all emails sent from WP are actually team leader/member initiated and pertain to the recipient’s church or team.

Nonetheless, the increase of emails can make recipients want to click the “Mark as Spam” button in their mail software. While doing so might stop the emails from showing up in their inboxes, it can have a negative effect that is much more widespread. In fact, a couple Internet service providers have blacklisted emails sent from WorshipPlanning.com because enough of their customers have marked messages sent from WP as spam (even though the emails were initiated by their team leaders/members). We have since been removed from those lists, but our fear is that this could be an increasing problem in the future.

So, to help deter recipients from flagging WP messages as spam, we are making a change to the subject line. We considered changing the subject to be “SPAM Check:Safe”, “Very Important Message”, “Message From The President”, or “Please, Please, Please Read This!”. But in the end, we decide the best thing is to simply add the name of the church to the front of the subject. So, updates to message boards will have a subject like: “-Grace Church- New WP Discussion Post”. Our hope is that recipients will be less inclined to flag something as spam if they easily see the message is related specifically to their church.

We plan on implementing this change the evening of August 2nd. If you have any feedback regarding this issue, feel free to leave a comment.